Assessment of pinniped predation most often relies on analysis of the hard, undigested prey remains evident in faecal (scat) samples. For many prey species this method can yield valuable information on predator–prey interactions. For some genera, however, species diagnostic characteristics are lost during the process of prey digestion, thereby preventing morphological identification of fish pre...

Traffic signals are one of the major components of arterial traffic network. A well designed signal setting benefits on increasing network efficiency and safety, on the contrary a poor setting could cause various problems. Many signal operation and optimization modes have been developed to deal with different traffic conditions. However researches related with evaluation of traffic signal effic...

The ability to noninvasively detect the presence of species and assess physiological health by DNA and hormone analysis makes scat a valuable tool for ecology and conservation. We assessed factors associated with DNA and hormone degradation in a four-season study that employed detection dogs to collect scats from maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus) in the Brazilian Cerrado, a tropical savanna la...

Food habits of tigers Panthera tigris in terms of prey abundance were studied in the semi-arid deciduous forests of Ranthambhore National Park, western India, between November 2000 and April 2001. Wild prey availability was assessed by line transects (n = 8) and prey selection by the tigers was determined from analysis of scats (n = 109). Compared to some other parts of the country, prey abunda...

Studies on red fox Vulpes vulpes biology, including habitat and food preferences have been very popular during recent decades. However, the majority of them were mainly carried out mainly in highly human-modified habitats. In this paper we present data on the diet of the red fox, with special attention to domestic poultry and on den site selection in extensive farmland in Poland. During the yea...

Noninvasive faecal DNA sampling has the potential to provide a wealth of information necessary for monitoring and managing endangered species while eliminating the need to capture, handle or observe rare individuals. However, scoring problems, and subsequent genotyping errors, associated with this monitoring method remain a great concern as they can lead to misidentification of individuals and ...

The endangered snow leopard is a large felid that is distributed over 1.83 million km(2) globally. Throughout its range it relies on a limited number of prey species in some of the most inhospitable landscapes on the planet where high rates of human persecution exist for both predator and prey. We reviewed 14 published and 11 unpublished studies pertaining to snow leopard diet throughout its ra...

Reconstructing the diet of top marine predators is of great significance in several key areas of applied ecology, requiring accurate estimation of their true diet. However, from conventional stomach content analysis to recent stable isotope and DNA analyses, no one method is bias or error free. Here, we evaluated the accuracy of recent methods to estimate the actual proportion of a controlled d...

Noninvasive genetics based on microsatellite markers has become an indispensable tool for wildlife monitoring and conservation research over the past decades. However, microsatellites have several drawbacks, such as the lack of standardisation between laboratories and high error rates. Here, we propose an alternative single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based marker system for noninvasively col...

Large cats feeding habits have been studied through two main methods: scat analysis and the carcasses of prey killed by monitored animals. From November 2001 to April 2004, we studied jaguar predation patterns using GPS telemetry location clusters on a cattle ranch in southern Pantanal. During this period, we recorded 431 carcasses of animals preyed upon by monitored jaguars. Concurrently, we c...